I have been using some flavor of GNU/Linux (which excludes Android) since about 2002. The first distro I ever installed was Lindows, and while I often used Lindows as my "main" distro because it was so easy to use, I was very much a distro shopper in my early years. I'd find a spare USB hard drive or flash drive and throw Gentoo or Debian or openSUSE or Fedora on it. It wasn't until the release of Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron, that I finally settled on a "preferred" distro: Ubuntu. And, unlike its commercial open source relative, Linspire, Ubuntu didn't run out of money and stop development. So that was a big plus.
Also unlike its other more distant relative, Fedora, Ubuntu had a more predictable release schedule, and longer support for each release. This meant I could feel free to use a crusty old installation on a dedicated server and be confident that I'd continue to receive critical security updates for years to come. And that's exactly what I did: starting around 2006, I have had either a dedicated